Tag: waves

It’s the question that eternally haunts me: What should I believe? The words that form on his lips or everything else that he left unspoken? When our very connection was the silence of our conversations, did he say the few things he truly meant, or did he simply trust I understood everything he omitted saying?

People always want to feel special. Simply knowing themselves that they were part of something big is never enough. They want others to know it, and acknowledge it. They want to be treated like a conquering hero returning with the world on their backs. Sure, they’ve achieved something the rest of us probably never will. But it’s also true that while they’ve been away (spiraling up into the clouds) we haven’t exactly been tuned in to their frequency, listening in with bated breath as they make their dream come true. For us, life went on.

They say even a taste of fame changes you. It leaves you a different person, unable to fit in among the nobodies. They are all grounded when they start off, resolute in thinking they won’t change. And then it hits them, their first taste of the salty spray of fame. They are intoxicated, overwhelmed by greatness, pulled in deeper by the ever-changing tide and the waves. And they adapt to the ebb and flow, knowing their place will always be by the bay. ‘Mumbai meri jaan’…

“She doesn’t like me. We were only fooling around, just a physical relationship between friends. We’d always made that clear between us”, he says, trying to sound matter-of-factly.

“Did you tell her you like her?”

“Why would I tell her that?”

“Cause you like her”.

“I don’t give a shit about her.”

Rejection. It’s a hard blow to the face that knocks out half your teeth and breaks your nose. It was with difficulty that you’d let yourself fall for someone without the thought of getting too serious. Barely a day gone by and you’d begun to miss them more than you’d like to admit. The concepts of ‘love’ and ‘dating’ were beginning to make sense again. Who’d have thought you were to fall, only to fall harder, alone.

Oh, how I love being high. The kind caused by liquor. The ‘drunk on life itself’ kind of high doesn’t come to me all that often.

That warm feeling as the rum settles down into your stomach. You feel the air around your face heating up and a flush rising up to your eyebrows. A beautiful cosy feeling of happiness that hugs you and lulls you into believing that everything is going to be so goooddd and you just need to sit back and relax. More alcohol, please.

Then it begins to work its magic on your organs, one by one. It’ll loosen your tongue right up, fire up the no-nonsense neurons of your brain and rattle your humor cells till they burst out in the silliest ways possible.

It’s like time itself slows down. If a friend keeps blabbing on about work pressures, when you’re sober it may bore the shit out of you. But when the world is a blur and time hangs suspended from the ceiling, you do not even realise how long you’ve been thinking and day dreaming about that guy you think you love but can never really end up with.

You realise you have extraordinary persuasion skills and somehow when you’re that high you manage to convince your friend to go to the beach with you in the middle of the night. You get to act the part of the lone artist who keeps alternating between thoughts like death and suicide and depression, and sudden rapturous glee when you watch the waves form in little ripples scurried along by the breeze to join hands across the shoreline and come crashing onto the beach. The sound makes you think of your own life crashing around yourself and the reasons you started drinking in the first place.

You want this feeling to last forever. You’re floating on your own cloud and don’t want that bubble to burst. You can spend hours lost within a moment, wordlessly admiring the sound of the waves echoes in the numbed recesses of your brain, and the feeling of soft sand melting underneath bare feet as the tide swallows the waves into its darkness. All you want is to treasure these ‘I feel alive’ moments with such precision and detail that it can never be filtered or pixelated to a lesser level of happiness than you presently feel.